[HPFGU-OTChatter] Gifted children: The debate rages on!

[Shaun Hately]

> Now haaaaang on a minute here.  I wasn't saying this at all.  I know all too well 
> that Australians are apt to see "gifted children" as some sort of un-Australian 
> blight on society, how dare they make other people feel inferior, the swine, they 
> should shut up and be like everyone else, cut down the tall poppy and trample it 
> into the dirt.  I was totally stigmatised and reviled in primary school for being too 
> smart.  At high school I went to a much more academic school and was put in the 
> gifted class (the PLC PEGS program, Shaun, any thoughts?), 

I don't know anything about it, actually. I know what PLC has on its website looks 
OK - but I also know that doesn't necessarily mean anything in the real world. It's 
not one that I know anyone who was in it.

> Sure, sure, obviously anecdotal evidence regarding a sample of maybe 20 people 
> I've observed over the years isn't the sort of thing around which research papers 
> and policies are built.  All the same, it was interesting for me to read your reply to 
> my post and see how many of my informal observations seemed to tally with 
> yours, notably in the effort issue.

Oh, yes, you're spot on on many of the problems and why they can occur.
 
> As for appropriate and well-designed programs, I have no doubt that if you have an 
> exceptional level of  "resources" available to you, programs which teach you how 
> to capitalise on them effectively have a very good chance of helping you become > highly successful in your chosen field.  That's pretty obvious.  I support the 
> development of programs which help the children manage their abundance of 
> intellectual resources, instead of being crushed under them.  However, the people 
> I have observed, and as I suspect you'd agree *most* gifted children, have *not* 
> had the chance to attend a well-designed program, but have been exposed to 
> varying degrees of well-intended stop-gap attempts to "do something for them" 
> from parents and educators.  

Definitely - there's a great deal out there that simply pay lipservice to dealing with 
the issues, rather than being any use in reality. And some can create problems 
instead of solving them.

> I suspect the competitive nature of the education system doesn't help much.  How 
> well do non-competitive systems like Steiner schools deal with giftedness?  
> Better?  

It really depend on a whole range of factors - the primary one being flexibility in 
their approaches. Schools like Steiners, Waldorfs, Montessori, etc - those which are 
based on a very precise educational philosophy - have a big positive in that most of 
the teachers in the school tend to be highly committed (this can be true of teachers 
in any school, but more mainstream schools tend to get some teachers for whom 
teaching is just a job - these 'philosophy-specific' schools generally don't) and 
committed teachers are very important.

*But* they also tend to be very committed to the philosophy in question - and that in 
some cases leads to total inflexibility to any modification to the curriculum etc - for 
example, Steiner's philosophy stated that children should not be asked to learn to 
read until they are ready to learn to read - that's not a problem, except that he also 
said that they weren't ready until age 7. There are some Steiner and Waldorf 
schools therefore that actively prevent children reading until that age.

As gifted kids often reach developmental milestones earlier than other children, this 
can be a serious problem. A lot depends of the personality of the child, and many 
Steiner-based schools are flexible. If they do have a reasonable level of flexibility, 
they tend to do a good job with most gifted kids.

> I in fact recently spoke to a friend of mine (whose 7yo daughter is at a Steiner 
> school) about giftedness and she is very anti "gifted" education, says that from 
> what she's read her daughter is probably "gifted" but the last thing she wants to do > is isolate her from other children on the basis of this, and she is very glad that her > daughter is in an environment where her individual potential is being addressed 
> without fanfare or stigmatising labels.

If her daughter is happy, then the school is probably doing an excellent job.

 Yours Without Wax, Dreadnought
Shaun Hately |webpage: http://www.alphalink.com.au/~drednort/thelab.html
(ISTJ)       |email: drednort at alphalink.com.au | ICQ: 6898200
"You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in
common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter
the facts to fit the views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen
to be one of the facts that need altering." The Doctor - Doctor Who:
The Face of Evil | Where am I: Frankston, Victoria, Australia